This Amazon employee had a startling realization when he spent six months trying to recruit new people

James Thomson worked at Amazon for more than five years in
multiple seller-services related roles. The entire time, he was
blown away by his fellow coworkers.

With a background in consulting and investment banking, he
figured he'd already worked among some of the smartest people he
would ever meet, but joining the e-commerce giant proved him
wrong.

"Lots of people had Type A personalities, were cutthroat, and all
that kind of stuff, but in terms of just raw intellectual power,
that was absolutely exhilarating," he told Business Insider. "The
caliber of people I was working with was truly impressive."

Thomson says that Amazon's dedication to careful hiring hit him
hardest when he was managing recruiting for the company's US
sales organization for about six months in 2012.

"It was at that point that I realized just how important it was
to bring in the right type of talent," he says. "The six months I
spent doing recruiting on the side, I realized that you have to
start with amazing ingredients to make an amazing cake. At
Amazon, a lot of positions remained open even when there was an
absolutely desperate need to fill it. There was a rigid
discipline in terms of validating every single candidate that I
hadn't seen before."

Thomson says he feels privileged to have had the chance to work
at Amazon, even though it certainly wasn't "cupcakes and tea"
every day.

"From the perspective of working with really smart people who
knew how to ask the right questions, get the right data, and get
to the root causes of problems, I never worked at an organization
that did that as well," he says.